SPOILER ALERT! In the final moments of the film Bougainvillea, ACP David Koshy, played by Fahadh Faasil, talks about the bad guy as someone who managed to hide himself smartly, referencing the iconic The Usual Suspects line, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” While the style meets substance factor is definitely keeping this Amal Neerad film really alive and engaging, it is not really able to conceal the suspense. Because of that, when the movie shifts gears in the final act, we don’t really get the same adrenaline rush we felt while watching something like a Varathan.
Dr. Royce and his wife, Reethu, are our central characters. The couple has two kids, and they are living a pretty happy life. Eight years ago, the couple was involved in a road accident, and the injuries of that accident resulted in Reethu being diagnosed with retrograde amnesia. Royce is taking care of her. Reethu has this obsession with Bougainvillea flowers, and she makes paintings of them. Things took an interesting turn when a minister’s daughter went missing, and the police found out that Reethu was following her. What is Reethu’s connection with the missing case is what we see in this movie.
The first half of the movie is very much dedicated to establishing the characters and their routines. We get to know about the health condition of Reethu as we observe her pattern and also through the details Royce conveys to Koshy. The thing is, the audience is intelligent, and from whatever existing thrillers they have seen, they will be obviously making the prediction in their head, looking at the way the characters behave in certain scenarios. Somewhere, I feel the film underestimates the audience, and when the big reveal happens at one point in the second half, it is more like the style is making us applaud for that scene rather than the fact that we couldn’t see it coming.
Jyothirmayi, who makes a comeback to films after a break of 11 years, gets a very meaty role in this psycho-thriller as Reethu. Since the character has retrograde amnesia and the movie is pretty much tracking the whole thing from her perspective, the performance had to be convincing, and she has done a fairly good job in pulling it off. The character of Royce has this grey shade. For some reason, I felt Kunchako Boban’s image as a chocolate boy or a nice guy makes him an eligible contender to play Royce. He has the required swagger in the second half of the movie, but the dialogue delivery could have been better. Fahadh Faasil, as ACP David Koshy, is very much playing an extended cameo in the film, and the guy has the sharpness one would expect to see in a police officer’s body language. Srinda was convincing in her role as Rema. Veena Nandakumar’s dialogue delivery was a bit flawed in many scenes. Sharaf U Dheen’s character didn’t really demand someone like him.
Amal Neerad films are known for their signature visual language, and Bougainvillea is no different. The misty visuals with dolly zooms are used extensively to show us the emotional state of Reethu. When it comes to the latter part of the film, which focuses more on the antagonist, the visuals are slightly more inclined towards the style factor. I have not read the book Ruthinte Lokam by Lajo Jose, which has a similar synopsis. So, this review is not going to be a book versus movie comparison. The details they leave in the first half of the movie to distract us in a different direction were sufficient. But as I said in the beginning, when DCP Koshy says they couldn’t see the possibility of what really happened, it’s almost like you feel like saying, “Bro, even I thought that person was a suspect, and you didn’t?” The action choreography in the finale was really brutal, and some of it, especially the chain fight featuring Veena Nandakumar, felt extremely real. Sushin Shyam’s background score is in that Varathan-ish zone, and it works for the movie.
There is a structural similarity between Bougainvillea and Varathan as both films are building stuff towards the very end to have a massive showdown with guns and blood in a stylish way. While Varathan was able to conceal the degree of that face-off by not revealing much about the hero and giving the audience something they were not anticipating, in the case of Bougainvillea, somewhere the gruesomeness was not enough to create that dramatic, stylish highpoint, largely because the devil’s trick wasn’t that foolproof on the audience.
The gruesomeness was not enough to create that dramatic, stylish highpoint, largely because the devil's trick wasn't that foolproof on the audience.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
